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Amazon is extending the availability of its AI-enabled shopping assistant, Rufus, to more markets in Europe and the Americas.
The ecommerce giant has been widely considered to be playing catchup with its Big Tech brethren in the AI sphere, particularly against the backdrop of the generative AI hype these past couple of years. Rufus is one of the ways Amazon is showing that it’s up for the game. Key features the tool offers include product search support, product comparisons, and recommendations on what to buy.
The AI chatbot has been trained on Amazon’s arsenal of data, spanning customer reviews, product catalogs, and other tangential public data to be primed to answer shoppers’ natural language questions — such as: “can you recommend some great gifts for kids under 5?,” or “compare different kinds of coffee makers.”
To access Rufus, shoppers in the new markets must update their Amazon Shopping app to the latest version, then they can tap a little icon at the bottom-right which surfaces a familiar chatbot-style interface.
Amazon’s Rufus in action. Image Credits:AmazonThe ecommerce giant first trialled Rufus in the U.S. back in February, before formally launching it five months later. In the intervening months, a beta version of the AI assistant has landed in India and the U.K. On Tuesday Amazon further expanded the beta’s availability to Canada, France, Germany, Italy, and Spain.
Rufus isn’t the only generative AI tool that Amazon has been working on — the company also recently launched new tools to help sellers improve their listings by generating product descriptions, titles, and associated details. Amazon has also committed $230 million to supporting generative AI startups.
Amazon is quick to stress that this is still an early iteration of Rufus, and — like many generative AI applications — it “won’t always get it exactly right.”
“We will keep improving our AI models and fine-tuning responses to continuously make Rufus more helpful over time,” the company wrote in a blog post.
Paul is a senior writer based in London, focused largely (but not exclusively) on the world of UK and European startups. He also writes about other subjects that he’s passionate about, such as the business of open source software. Prior to joining TechCrunch in June 2022, Paul had gained more than a decade’s experience covering consumer and enterprise technologies for The Next Web (now owned by the Financial Times) and VentureBeat. Pitches on: paul.sawers [at] techcrunch.com Secure/anon tip-offs via Signal: PSTC.08
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